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BelindaSenpai's avatar
BelindaSenpai
New Novice
2 months ago

Game keeps crashing since downloading Life and Death Expansion Pack

Ever since downloading the Life and Death Expansion Pack my game has been crashing for no reason. After around a minute of booting the game up it crashes if it is on a loading screen or the main menu and freezes if I actually get into the game. If I get into the game I can still hear the music and the sounds of the buttons clicking (such as like the fast forward button or the play button) but the play screen is frozen and I can't select the exit button. I thought it was because of maybe an update on release day but I just updated the game again and the crashing continues. I could play the game with the update just before Life and Death was released but ever since it has not worked. I have tried booting the game without Life and Death by setting the launch options to "-disablepacks:EP17" and it still did not work. I have also tried the deletion of typical problematic files in my "Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4" directory and that still did not work.

Is this something I can fix?

  • BelindaSenpai  As a test, please try playing in a clean user folder.  Move the entire Sims 4 folder out of Documents > Electronic Arts and onto your desktop.  When you launch the game, a clean folder will spawn with no content.  (Your saves and other content will be intact in the folder you've moved but temporarily unread by the game.)  Don't add anything to the new folder yet; just see whether you can get far enough to start a new save and play in live mode for a bit.

    If you get another freeze or crash, please provide a dxdiag.  Hit Windows key-R, enter dxdiag in the run box, wait for the scan to finish, click "Save all information," and save the file to your desktop.  From there, you can attach it to a reply using the paper clip (Attachment) icon included with the other formatting buttons.

  • BelindaSenpai  Your dxdiag lists a few serious crashes of the graphics driver, and some crashes of GPU Tweak III.  So please uninstall the latter and restart your computer.

    If you get yet another crash, update your driver, which is new enough to not be a problem in theory, but these crashes make updating the next troubleshooting step.  Go here:

    https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/

    Select GeForce, RTX 30 series, RTX 3070, Windows 10, and download the Game Ready Driver.  Run the installer as an admin: right-click the download and select "Run as administrator."  Choose the Custom (not Express) install method, and check the box to perform a clean install.  Restart your computer again afterwards and before trying to play.

    I would also suggest temporarily disconnecting any USB 3 devices, as the Windows USB 3 driver is crashing too.  This is usually not a serious problem—often enough, simply restarting without the devices connected fixes the issue.  So you can reconnect them after a restart or two.

    If you get yet another crash after all this, please look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor.  Hit Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart of errors and updates with a column for each day.  Today is on the right.

    Look for an error that happened at exactly the time of your most recent Sims 4 crash.  If you find one, double-click it to see more details, then copy that info and paste it into a reply here.  If you don't see a new error, check back in an hour or so—the Reliability Monitor doesn't always update right away.

    • BelindaSenpai's avatar
      BelindaSenpai
      New Novice

      I have uninstalled GPU tweak III and updated my driver. I have also unplugged my usb 3 stuff and restarted my computer but it is still crashing. Here is the Reliability Monitor stuff from the last crash last night.

      Description
      Faulting Application Path:    C:\Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 4\Game\Bin\TS4_x64.exe

      Problem signature
      Problem Event Name:    APPCRASH
      Application Name:    TS4_x64.exe
      Application Version:    1.110.311.1020
      Application Timestamp:    67254662
      Fault Module Name:    TS4_x64.exe
      Fault Module Version:    1.110.311.1020
      Fault Module Timestamp:    67254662
      Exception Code:    c0000005
      Exception Offset:    0000000001815831
      OS Version:    10.0.19045.2.0.0.768.101
      Locale ID:    3081
      Additional Information 1:    626c
      Additional Information 2:    626cd68f428521a40853f727af557f64
      Additional Information 3:    1e7a
      Additional Information 4:    1e7a127acb023b0d77663fd524341d85

      Extra information about the problem
      Bucket ID:    8995f16fd70c370c2294b6264dad8ad4 (1338895264864111316)

  • BelindaSenpai  This is an access violation, too generic to be much use here.  Is this still in a new save with no mods or custom content?  If so, what was happening on-screen at the time of the crash?

    • BelindaSenpai's avatar
      BelindaSenpai
      New Novice

      I don't use mods or custom content so that isn't it. Yeah I took all of my files out of the folder and started anew and it is still happening. It is not happening with any other games on my computer. I've been playing Life is strange: Double Exposure in the meantime and have had zero issues.

      What is happening on-screen at the time of the crash? Sometimes it'll freeze in the first loading screen or if I get far enough I'll get to create a sim or the main menu and I'll press on something and it will freeze and I can't do anything. Today it hasn't crashed yet it is just sitting in the first loading screen I can hear the music and I was able to "press on" something and it made a noise but it didn't change the screen. It's been 5 minutes and it hasn't crashed yet but it is frozen and my arrow shows a loading symbol on it. After I "pressed something" it isn't letting me press anything again and nothing is happening.  It is not crashing just stuck in the first loading screen after the main title pops up when beginning the game. sorry for talking so much I am very confused every other time I tried to play recently it would have crashed by now after a few seconds. 

  • BelindaSenpai  Please unplug all peripherals and accessories except for your mouse and keyboard, and restart your computer.  (This includes speakers and headphones, plus any external drives.)  Leave them unplugged while testing the game.

    If this doesn't help, please try playing in a clean boot:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

    The one service to leave enabled is the EABackgroundService, which the EA App needs in order to run.  Disable the rest as described.

    When you reboot your computer, go through the Task Manager's background processes list shutting down any service that doesn't absolutely need to be running, for example anything from MSI Afterburner to RGB software might still be enabled.  If you accidentally kill a critical process and it doesn't restart on its own, just reboot your computer again.

    Don't open anything other than Sims 4 and the EA App while testing, not even a browser window.
    If this helps, you can selectively reenable services until you find the culprit, then either leave that disabled or (if it belongs to an app you want to keep using) let me know what it is so we can try to fix the underlying issue.

    If the game freezes or crashes in a clean boot, please try again, except with your computer offline.  You can sign into the EA App and put it in offline mode, then disable wifi and/or disconnect the ethernet cable before pressing Play.

    If this still doesn't help, please post a new dxdiag.

  • BelindaSenpai  Your new dxdiag shows more crashes of the graphics driver, but the clean uninstall and reinstall should have addressed any driver-related issues.  This suggests the problem might be the graphics card itself.  It's not definitive, but the next step here would be to test with a different GPU, if you can.

    Do you have a friend or family member who'd be willing to let you test with their graphics card?  If the game is fine, that's a pretty clear sign that the GPU is the issue.  If it's not, then we can keep digging, but the problems that would lead to this are more rare than a defective graphics card, which is why I'm suggesting you test now.

    For another Nvidia card, you don't need to do anything aside from physically swapping them; for an AMD GPU, you'd need to DDU the Nvidia driver and install the newest one from AMD.  Make sure the card has the appropriate power delivery; you can check its specs online if you're not sure.

    If you can't test with a different GPU, at least not now, I'd suggest checking the power cables, on both ends, removing and reseating them.  The card should have two 8-pin connectors.  If that alone doesn't help, remove the GPU and reinstall it to the other PCIe x16 slot, a little below the one it's currently using.  This slot is significantly slower, to the point that it would bottleneck the GPU, but it's usable for testing purposes.

    You can see for yourself whether you're getting more crashes of the graphics driver; just check the Reliability Monitor as you go.  This particular type of crash is called a LiveKernelEvent 141: the driver failed to respond in what Windows deems an appropriate amount of time (two seconds by default), so Windows kills the driver.  A LiveKernelEvent 144 is a crash of the USB 3 driver, like we talked about before, if you get curious and end up poking around a bit.